Meet Pied Piper’s New COO!

Apologies if this post is a bit more scattered than usual, but my fingers are verily flying across the keyboard with joy! I’ve had a cascade of dreams come true recently. I never thought anything could surpass my Make-A-Wish meeting with Amy Tan when I was misdiagnosed with that wasting disease. But this moment? This is the happiest I’ve ever been.

Dream Come True #1: Richard Hendricks was my houseguest! When Jian-Yang first evicted my friends and colleagues from the hostel, I was furious. After all, this was the place we’d all roughhoused, traded jabs, looked up those jabs on Urban Dictionary to make sure we understood them fully. But the sterling silver lining of this betrayal was that Richard needed a place to stay, and I was honored to supply.

I’ll admit, there were a few bumps during our shack-up. We didn’t have time for the wine and paint night I’d planned, for one. My attempt to play corporate matchmaker for Richard went about as well as my attempt to get him to use a hair pomade. And I was called back to the house when Gilfoyle, surrounded by refrigerator parts, had a brief waltz with a paranoid break.

But it all worked out in the end: Without going into the NDA-protected details, I negotiated a deal for Pied Piper that saved us from quite a thorny lawsuit. Which brings me to Dream Come True #2: Richard Hendricks has named me, Jared Dunn from an unknown location in the contiguous United States, COO of Pied Piper!

Readers, you know it’s not like me to brag like this. As my fourth grade teacher once told me, “Confidence isn’t a color that suits you, Donald.” Well, personal color palettes be damned because I am reeling over here!

Okay, okay. Time to put away the Martinelli’s and head to bed — as if I could possibly fall asleep!

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The old Pied Piper “flute player” logo was referencing the fairy-tale character and in no way was meant to suggest a sexual act involving either the mouth or ear of the figure depicted. Apologies to any who were offended, and the logo has been changed to our current hat design by Mary Shibley that's clean, elegant and not without some danger.

Problem 1:

Single Points of Failure

Libraries are vulnerable to losing their collection because all of their books are contained at a single location. Say, for instance, that there was a fire, or a flood, or a vandal defaced John James Audubon’s masterpiece Birds of America by giving all the Warblers human genitalia. Even worse, if the vandal recruited bird haters from other neighborhoods and got ahold of all the copies of the book in existence, it could be lost crude doodles forever. It would be a tragedy on par with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

The Problem

Because Birds of America is centralized in one public location, it’s susceptible to permanent deletion. The same goes for content on the Internet — storing all your family photos on a single account in a cloud service? They could all be wiped away if someone hacked your account or corrupted the host servers.

The Solution

Our solution: In our decentralized library, we would duplicate and distribute multiple copies of Birds of America to your neighbors — if you need a copy, you would just go to your neighbor’s house. As our Pipernet town of mobile devices grows, so do the number of neighbors who might have a copy of your book. And the more potential copies there are available, the more secure the book is.

That’s what our new internet will allow you to do too: spread your personal files on devices across the world, so they’re completely safe from bad actors manipulating or deleting them.

Takeaways

All copies of your files in a well-known, hackable location = RISKY!

Files copied and distributed to multiple locations = SAFE!

Problem 2:

No Privacy

In order to check out books, you must have a library card — an ID that links back to your real world identity. That library card reveals all the books you’ve ever checked out, where you returned them, and whether they were returned on time.

The Problem

The tech titans collect data profiles on us too, and theirs are far more comprehensive. They amass thousands of personal data points by tracking our activities in both the online and physical worlds.

Users don’t own or control their own data, so it can be used against them. Take, for instance, Richard’s lawyer Pete Monahan, who had his probation revoked when the state retrieved his library records. Which was… probably a good idea. But for this metaphor’s purposes: bad that they can access that information!

On the web, our data profile is far more detailed, the laws around privacy even looser, and more freedoms are at stake. For example, what if Hooli sold your search data to an insurance company who then denied you coverage because you’ve HooliSearch-ed “kindest Palo Alto based Cardiologist” a few too many times?

The Solution

Replace library cards with anonymous identification cards which are impossible to connect to your real world identity. Instead of using a library card (linked to your name, address, etc.) to check out books, you would swipe a nondescript card (containing no personal details). Your activity would be tracked to keep the system stable, but your identity would not be siphoned and sold. I, for example, would no longer check out books as "Donald Dunn," but rather the nom de guerre "h3w0vbk37vpm."

That’s what our new internet will allow you to do too: use its apps and services without compromising your privacy.

Takeaways

Trading your identity and data for online services = RISKY!

Using services anonymously so nobody can target you = SAFE!

Problem 3:

Censorship and Manipulation

Because a town’s library is run by a small group of administrators, they could theoretically decide what books are available to its people. They could even decide to ban Birds of America, depriving young birders of Audubon’s elegant illustrations, pored over page by page under a government-issued blanket after lights out, giving you hope that even a slender-framed, shivering boy could grow to be as majestic as a Hooded Merganser.

The Problem

On the internet, multinational corporations can screen content, or even “adapt” their services to fit the local government’s requests. In both libraries and on the Web, we’re susceptible to data being censored or manipulated by intermediaries.

The Solution

A peer-to-peer lending system backed up by a fully public ledger, allowing you to send and receive books freely to anybody in the world without worrying about censorship or interference. Want to add Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, or your controversial essay on Audubon’s coloring techniques? No problem, even if the town surrounded you with pitchforks to ban them, these vital texts would be available to share neighbor to neighbor, impossible to delete.

That’s what our new internet will allow you to do too: exchange messages and files directly with their intended receiver, disperse ideas and information free from threats of censorship.

Takeaways

Pushing all transactions through a central authority = OPPRESSIVE!

Establishing a peer to peer exchange system based on an immutable public ledger = FREE!